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RE: Witness Update - Upgrading VPS, Back Online Shortly
who is witnesses? what they do? i voted near your nickname but i dont know what is this :) 
who is witnesses? what they do? i voted near your nickname but i dont know what is this :)
Hey @investwarrior,
Witnesses are the one holding the system together:)
They're runing a node on their server and collecting all the transactions from this page for example than put them into a block.
If you know what is mining from the dictionary of Bitcoin, well, it is almost the same.
Witnesses also set the SBD price according to changes is STEEM price.
so your pc working 24x7 and mine nodes and you receive sbd?
Witnesses only decide the price of SBD, they are paid in STEEM. But Steem is waaay different from Bitcoin. I might just confused you with that reference:) Let me try to clear it this time:
A witness PC runs a node, which collects the transactions (posts, comments, votes, etc) broadcasted by interfaces like steemit.com, busy.org, esteem App, etc. and puts them into the next block.
Steem is being managed trough Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) mechanism. But not every stakeholders taking part in the validation of transactions (you and me are also stakeholders), only elected witnesses securing the blockchain, managing the transactions, and getting consensus. They are doing the hard part:)
When new STEEM is created, witnesses receive 10% of new coins, 15% used to pay interest on Steem Power for everybody (vesting fund), the remaining 75% goes to the reward fund and distributed to authors and curators.
So in a way, every user on Steem is a miner but we have to write posts, comments and vote to receive coins.
Blockchains have blocks of data. Nodes have that data, and witness nodes verify the integrity and immutability of blocks. A witness get some steem for verifying/validating blocks int he blockchain. They can bring changes to the chain if they are in the top 19. So if you like what someone represents, what they stand for, and want to support them in their efforts, vote for their witness :)